


So Sweetly Scented

by FromAnonymousToZ



Category: Over the Garden Wall (Cartoon & Comics)
Genre: Another one requested by an anon on tumblr, Character studies, Established Relationship, Holy shit I have written so much since quarintine has started, M/M, Please do not continue to expect this level of production from me, Relationship Study, Reminiscing, Scents & Smells, Short & Sweet, This year has been hard on everyone and my coping mechanism is writing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-04
Updated: 2020-11-04
Packaged: 2021-03-09 00:08:24
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,137
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27385459
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/FromAnonymousToZ/pseuds/FromAnonymousToZ
Summary: The Beast's nose is a sensitive thing.Enoch's nose is less so, but he's observant.
Relationships: The Beast/Enoch (Over the Garden Wall)
Comments: 4
Kudos: 31





	So Sweetly Scented

**Author's Note:**

> Interested in the origin of this story? It was requested [here](https://doyouknowhowtowaltz.tumblr.com/) at my tumblr! Feel free to drop by and if you have a question or request go right ahead and drop it in my ask box!

The Beast’s nose is a finely tuned sensitive thing. 

Pottsfeild is a near maddening cacophony of scents to his nose. 

Pottsfeild is alcohol, and cinnamon, and apples, and pumpkins and hay, its baking pies and dirt and bone and rot. It's like a thousand voices rising in a chorus, complementing one another and adding depth and nuance, bordering on just too much.

But Pottsfeild is nothing without Enoch, and Enoch is many smells, an orchestra all on his own. 

Enoch smells like liquor most of the time, and sugar, boiling into caramel. It's a delightful scent. 

Somedays, Enoch smells like rot and cinnamon, clashing in sweet, spicy decay as the Harvest Lord's agitated ribbons rip and twine themselves to tatters. 

Sometimes, Enoch smells like pumpkin blossoms, errant, distracted, and preoccupied with something the Beast is not privy to. 

Despite his wide range of scents, Enoch is relatively consistent. 

He smells like peace, contentment, plenty, everything else merely modifying without changing his fundamentals. 

It catches the Beast off guard sometimes. Roaming through the wood, tracking down his quarry, when a wisp of contentment catches his attention, and for a brief moment, he wonders how he got so close to Pottsfeild. 

It's jarring, reorienting himself to the winter wood when his souls are thinking of Pottsfeild, and it’s ever overflowing magistrate. 

He’ll track down the scent to a small town tucked in the fold of the wood, food on every plate, and fires in every hearth. 

Sometimes the scents of contentment linger on the shoulders of travelers, and he thinks of a black cat with a coy smile or a maypole with a broad grin. 

Contentment finds him in the sighs of children or the laundry baskets of old women, and he freezes if only for a moment, to think of Pottsfeild, to think of Enoch. 

Generally speaking, it's not a scent he enjoys. 

Contented folk are the furthest from despairing, and though contented souls of the winter wood were far easier to put down than contented Pottsfeilders, it still took far more time and energy to push them to despair. 

It’s an indication of a hindrance, one that generally causes mild annoyance. 

It had initially been irritating to endure when he did visit Pottsfeild. It wasn't in and of itself an irritant, but he had not found it necessarily pleasant.

Over several hundred years and a handful of visits to Pottsfeild, he had begun to feel far more neutrally. 

It had only been the first time the Beast and Enoch had gotten into a proper debate about the nature of mortals wishing on stars, an argument which had lasted from sunset to sunrise that the Beast had found the scent of contentment and plenty ebbing from the Harvest Lord pleasant. 

Enoch was sweet and warm and alcoholic. He was plenty and contentment. 

Enoch was an orchestra of scents rising in harmony, and he was Enoch. 

The Beast enjoys Enoch’s scent and his company.

The Beast enjoys Enoch. 

* * *

Generally, Enoch doesn't have a nose. 

Despite the fact that his preferred skin is the catskin, he usually favors skins like the maypole out of utility. 

It was easily half a millennia from their first meeting that Enoch first encountered the Beast in his catskin. It would be much longer before he would get close enough to the Beast to properly smell him. 

It had been a touch that had left him a little too shocked to properly think of the Beast’s scent at the time. 

The Beast had, somewhat distractedly, reached out to caress the catskin’s ears, claws rubbing along Enoch’s ears. Enoch had been left blinking at the touch. He hadn't even spared a thought to the strange smell that clung to the Beast. 

In ensuing decades, when the Beast initiating touch became slowly more common, Enoch would begin to recognize the smell. 

It was a smell of a forest, decaying leaves, icy snow, wood, tinged with something that Enoch could not place.

The smell was… strange. It was wild like the woods where it had sprung from, tainted by something that Enoch could only place as  _ wrong _ . 

Something which might have smelled like shadow or despair had he assigned a smell to either of those things. 

Enoch liked the smell immediately.

It was crisp and stark, easily identifiable. Among Pottsfeilders who smelled of baked goods and soil and crops, it was something distinct. It was sharp-edged, and there was an organicness of it that could only be found in untamed wilds as opposed to neatly lined houses and straight rows of crops. 

It was not that he did not enjoy the scents of his own town. It was merely that it was a pleasant change. It was natural and, in its own way, refreshing. 

Eventually, he would come to be far more attuned to the nuances of the Beast’s smell. His nose was not as sensitive as the Winter Warden’s, nor was it as precise, but he did pick up a few traits that he cataloged away with careful clarity. He could not detect subtle shifts, but in broader strokes, he grew able to recognize the Beast’s general mood. 

Hunger was not a thing Enoch would have assumed to have a smell before he encountered the Beast. 

Hunger was the rumbling of a stomach, the gleam in an eye, the slack of a jaw. Hunger was a story told by the body, by posture, saliva, and hands fluttering towards food. 

The Beast was a hungry creature. Ravenous, really, but he had lived with hunger so long and was such a graceful thing, he had learned to school any indication he might give of hunger. The Beast never wavered towards Enoch’s plenty, his eyes never drew towards food or plenty, he was perfectly composed at all times. 

He was a starving thing, always hungry, always consuming, always empty, only barely satiated by the oil feeding his lantern. 

Some winters, the hunger was worse, ragged, and demanding. 

The Beast’s scent took on an almost hollow quality when his hunger was at its worst. 

Enoch found he immensely disliked the hollowness. 

It irritated the catskin's nose to no end, and when Enoch tried to make reference to it, he was only met by bland confusion. The Beast did not appear particularly aware of how his scent changed to reflect his hunger. Enoch imagined he'd be dreadfully annoyed to find he had such a tell. 

Even a flicker of that hollow smell prompted him to tempt the Beast into allowing Enoch to pour plenty into him. 

The Beast usually relents and allows Enoch to soothe the ragged edges of his hunger, chasing away the hollowness in his scent. 

Enoch enjoys the Beast’s scent. 

He has enjoyed it since the very beginning. 

He enjoys it, even more, when he’s the one influencing it.

**Author's Note:**

> Interested in the origin of this story? It was requested [here](https://doyouknowhowtowaltz.tumblr.com/) at my tumblr! Feel free to drop by and if you have a question or request go right ahead and drop it in my ask box!
> 
> I have written... practically nonstop since March. This has been a truly awful year for a vast number of reasons, and I have chosen to cope by writing. I have added over 350 pages to my WIP folder, and nearly doubled the amount of stories I had published. Based on my current drafts I don't *think* I'm going to put out anything else this year except for the one request left in my ask box. 
> 
> I don't know, maybe I'll post 12 fics in the next two months or maybe I won't post any.


End file.
